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We take it for granted with documentaries that they’ll tell us things we don’t know about how our frazzled world turns.

With Toronto’s annual Hot Docs commencing its 20th edition, we can expect all manner of revelations from the 161 features and 44 shorts screening over the festival’s 11-day run.

But sometimes it’s the timing rather than the topic that makes the grander statement. It interests me that the fest will screen several films probing the online world, which we’re all living in whether we like it or not.

Alex Winter’s Downloaded chronicles the rise, fall and fallout of Napster.com, the song-sharing service that almost brought down the recording industry.

Cullen Hoback’s Terms and Conditions May Applyexamines thetruly scary diminishment of personal privacy that occurs every time someone innocently clicks the “accept” box on a boilerplate contract from such online behemoths as Google and Facebook.

These are all worthy films raising serious issues, but my question is: Why did it take so long? The Internet as we know it turns 20 this year, if you date its rise, as many do, from the 1993 release of Mosaic, the first popular web browser.

It took just three years after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 to rip into assumptions regarding the causes and effects of America’s modern nightmare. And the Vietnam War was still winding down in 1974 when Peter Davis’ Oscar-winning Hearts and Minds made a scathing summation of that terrible imperialist misadventure.

Yet the impact of the Internet, one of the most significant events of all of our lives, has yet to inspire its own Fahrenheit 9/11 or Hearts and Minds. There have been many Internet-themed movies, at least as far back as Startup.com, which premiered at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. But there are none I can think of that really examine the Net’s all-encompassing influence on our daily lives.

Part of this is due to the fact that “Internet” and “online” have so many meanings and ramifications, and it’s likely that no single movie could credibly take them on as a whole. The three films at Hot Docs focus on narrower aspects of digital culture, although the best of them, Terms and Conditions May Apply, makes a great start at addressing larger issues.

I suspect the bigger problem is that social changes wrought by the Internet aren’t always immediately apparent. When you’re right in the eye of a hurricane, it can be hard to see all the damage caused by the whirling winds.

This is certainly the picture painted by Downloaded. It depicts how teenaged computer nerds Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker created a revolution out of their desire to easily access “free” MP3s of their favourite pop songs.

In 1998, Fanning wrote the Napster program in an office broom closet borrowed from his uncle in Hull, Mass. Parker helped him develop it, and before long their peer-to-peer sharing service had millions of worldwide users, and many furious and alarmed musicians and music biz honchos waving lawsuits.

Irony of ironies, these heavy-metal fans even had bands like Metallica raging against their machine. Yet Fanning insists in Downloaded that his creation of Napster “came from a very pure place.” He just wanted lots of songs without having to spend lots of money. By the time the courts effectively shuttered Napster in the summer of 2001, the damage had already been done: a generation of music fans had grown used to the idea of “free” music.

There’s no “pure place” in the actions of the three Swedes featured in TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard. Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg plainly enjoy having thrown a monkey wrench into the movie industry with their wildly popular BitTorrent site Pirate Bay.

With a large sense of entitlement and no small amount of smugness, the three see themselves as digital-era Robin Hoods (“disorganized crime” is their term), defending Internet freedoms as they help distribute “free” movies to the masses, copyright be damned.

Hollywood claims lost sales that run into the billions, and also many lost jobs, but the Pirate Bay buccaneers don’t really care — although the courts may soon force them to pay heed.

None of these guys is particularly likeable, and Svartholm Warg comes across as downright obnoxious. He helped start Pirate Bay after having creating America’s Dumbest Soldiers, a website that mocked U.S. soldiers killed in the Iraq War.

TPB AFK won’t do wonders for your faith in humanity, online or off, but the real Internet head-rattler of Hot Docs 2013 is Terms and Conditions May Apply. It presents a terrifying reality — the future is now! — where all of the things we consider to be personal and private in our lives are easily accessible to anyone anywhere with a few clicks of a keyboard.

Ever wonder why Google no longer promotes its founding slogan “Don’t be evil”? It may be because the company has over the past decade steadily watered down the privacy protections it offers users of its search engine, Gmail and other services.

Similar things are happening at Facebook, Apple’s iTunes and the like.

Digital giants aggregate user info from multiple platforms and services, creating powerful databases containing information that can be sold for big profit, often on a stealth basis. The film gives the example of a Dutch GPS maker that sold road-usage data gleaned from drivers to the police, allowing the cops to set up more effective (and lucrative) speed traps.

Even more alarming is how readily people submit to having their freedoms removed, because nobody reads the boilerplate contracts that come with every digital device and app.

Baby-faced Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg shrugs off how his own firm has monkeyed with privacy rights: “We decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

Yet he’s not at all happy when director Hoback turns the tables and invades Zuckerberg’s privacy, by stalking him during a neighbourhood stroll and seeking an impromptu interview.

There’s at least one other film at Hot Docs this year that shows the folly of reckless engagement with new technology. It’s Penny Lane’s Our Nixon, which makes use of 500 reels of previously unseen Super 8 footage shot by Richard Nixon’s White House henchmen, who apparently felt that every moment of the disgraced president’s reign needed to be kept for posterity.

These include the infamous Watergate tapes, made by the clandestine machinery Nixon had installed in the Oval Office to record every telephone conversation — including many that later implicated him in Watergate crimes, leading to his 1974 resignation.

The rough Super 8 footage gives us a glimpse of the taping equipment in action. We hear Nixon say, “I think it will work fine. It’s a good system.”

Like Napster’s Shawn Fanning, Nixon figured he was proceeding from a “pure place” of noble intentions. We know what happened with Watergate; we’re still waiting to get the full picture on what the Internet has wrought.

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